Misery Acquaints A Man
by Poke-it-with-a-Stick
Summary: First Class. Companion piece to Strange Bedfellows. A motel, some angst, not much sleep.


**So I attempted to write a Discworld fic for about four hours last night, and it really wasn't working, so it was with some relief that I escaped to the somewhat easier world of X-Men, where you mercifully don't have to knock out your brains attempting to imitate an author's style. Pratchett is a god, but he's bloody difficult to write decent fic for, especially when it involves Vetinari. Anyway, this started out as the darker and angstier companion piece to Strange Bedfellows, twisted itself round a few corners and ended up having a reasonably fluffy ending, all things considered. I swear, the next story I write will actually have a plot, as opposed to being an emotion-driven quasi-character piece. I think I'm getting a little predictable. **

The first time they were forced to share a bed, it was in a tiny motel a hundred miles from anywhere that Charles had stranded them at through his piss-poor map-reading skills. Things started badly and went downhill from there, the two men apparently being complete opposites in their sleeping habits. Erik was exhausted from driving all day and wanted nothing more than to rest, Charles more inclined to stay up late poring over a genetics textbook; Erik stripped to underwear for bed, Charles, blushing, turned his back to pull on his own pajamas. Eventually, the lights were turned out and the two men lay as far away from each other as they possibly could in the too-soft (Erik's opinion), too-hard (Charles'), far too narrow (a rare case of unanimity) motel bed.

Erik was not actually that uncomfortable with the situation itself: with his past, any night he spent in an actual bed was a blessing, even if that bed was considerably too narrow for any two people who weren't married to sleep in it with modesty. In fact, none of this would have been a problem at all were it not for the constant, thrumming tension he could feel pouring off Charles like water. The man probably didn't even realise he was projecting it, he was that tactless; all easy Oxford charm that only held up when everything went his way. Tug him out of his depth and look how quickly he fell to pieces.

Erik closed his eyes against the too-light room and wished he could shut his brain to Charles' low, tense psychic murmurings in much the same way. He supposed, grudgingly, that he understood what was bothering the telepath. He himself had always been perfectly content to sleep beside another; lulled by the low hum of metal from his surroundings, safe in the knowledge of the hundred tiny screws and buckles and buttons and pins that would spring to his defence were they to try to harm him. For Charles, it would be more difficult. Perhaps it was the constant need to guard his mind, the fear that to get too close to another person would mean revealing himself, that made him so stiff and nervous under such conditions. Such a fear would, of course, be absurd when it came to Erik, but then, the fact of his own safety did not stop Erik from, far back in some dark corner of his mind, cataloguing every piece of metal in the room, just in case.

It took a few more tosses and turns - a hopeless attempt to escape the grating mental tension - before Erik was irritated enough to sit up and turn the lamp back on. Charles blinked up at him in the harsh neon light, all mussed hair and red, sleepless eyes. He looked very young.

"Fuck's sake," said Erik, which didn't exactly win him any points for eloquence, but hell, it was two am and he was _tired_. "What the fuck's wrong? It's like sleeping next to a bloody barbed-wire fence."

"I'm sorry, Erik," said Charles, and his expression was pure misery. "I just-"

"You just _what_?" snapped Erik, and regretted it immediately. Charles looked like he was about to burst into tears.

"I was trying not to - I didn't want - Oh, goddamnit." Charles raised two fingers to his temple, and the stuttering voice became a smooth flow of images - night at Xavier Mansion, Erik fighting the too-soft sheets of an alien bed as a nightmare dug its claws into his mind. Charles curled beneath his own covers, trying desperately to block out another man's pain, fighting the urge to run to his room and wake him, for fear that Erik would despise him for the invasion. For fear of making the damage worse.

_I didn't want you to think I was interfering_, said Charles inside Erik's head. _But I didn't know what to do if it happened again. If it happened here. This close, I wouldn't be able to stay out of your head; I might make the whole thing worse. I didn't want you to hate me for it. _He dropped his fingers again; stared at Erik in miserable challenge. Erik, for his part, didn't quite know whether to laugh or cry. His nightmares were terrible, true, and he felt more than a little guilty that Charles had ended up sharing their pain. But for the telepath to worry himself sleepless on the off-chance of his accidental interference was out of all proportion, even for a man so accustomed to overthinking things as Charles Xavier. Besides which, Erik was fairly sure that Charles could only improve any nightmare he got tangled up in. Even dream-Shaw - more an octopus than a man, insinuating his tentacles of horror into every corner of Erik's psyche - probably wouldn't stand up for too long against the telepath's righteous blue-eyed glare.

"Fuck's sake," mumbled Erik again, and hoped that Charles had caught those last few thoughts, because he was far too tired to articulate them properly. "I give you full permission to invade my mind and kick my nightmares' arses, okay? Just don't do it any other time, or I'll kick yours."

"You've done a sterling job of keeping nightmares away for the past few hours, if only by keeping me persistently and frustratingly awake," he continued, as Charles - reading not only the thoughts he'd intended him to see, but also the deeper ones, about trust and privacy and Charles very definitely being the only one allowed to do this - grinned a grin that was in mixed parts joy, relief and exhaustion. "Now"- he reached across the bare three inches of space dividing them, grabbed Charles and dragged him closer, negating the problem of the too-narrow bed in an instant - "can we please just go the fuck to sleep without any more psychic drama? I'd like to be in a suitable state to drive in the morning, and we're going to have an early start if we want to make up the time your cartographical shenanigans lost us today."

There are a lot of things Charles would have liked to say in response; warm, light things that Erik could feel pushing at the entrance to his mind. Instead, all he said was, "I can't believe you just used 'fuck' and 'cartographic' in the same sentence," and turned out the light.


End file.
